Sami Shah's second life as a comedian

By John Bailey

March 23, 2016 — 8.56am

A comedy insider recently got in touch to tell me about Sami Shah, who she described as "the most important new voice in Australian comedy, hands down". That's a big statement, but dig a little into the stand-up's life and it's hard to argue that he's not the most interesting at least.

Shah spent most of his life in Pakistan, a country not known for its lively stand-up scene. There's a long and rich history of comedy in the country, he says, but it's more sketch-based or joke-book stuff. Still, there's an awareness of the art of stand-up. "When we were kids, everyone grew up with Eddie Murphy's Raw and Delirious."

Sami Shah is not only an important new voice in Australian comedy, but one of the most interesting.

So what's an aspiring comic to do? Spend six months building up his hour in front of a mirror, then book a theatre and perform it. In 2005, Shah performed Pakistan's first American-style stand-up show. Three hundred people turned up. If the first 30 seconds had bombed, he says, he never would have done it again, "but I got lucky and it didn't, so I kept on with it".

During the next six years, Shah performed part time. He spent his days working in a newsroom, handling news bulletins and writing satirical columns, and his nights honing his act, which is hard when there are no comedy clubs in the country.

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Melbourne Comedy Festival.

His solution was a novel one: about this time the online virtual world of Second Life was still a thing, and Shah discovered that there was a kind of comedy club within it. "It was just people coming on and reading joke books, so I started performing there two or three times per week. The audience was all from America and England, so I'd wake up just to be there when they logged in, and in Pakistan that was six in the morning. I ended up earning a few hundred dollars doing comedy in Second Life in Pakistan for at least a year or two."

By 2009, it became clear to Shah that Pakistan wasn't the safest place for a political satirist. "I'd been getting death threats every now and then because of my columns and the news satire stuff, so we applied for Australian immigration in 2009 and they quickly processed that 3½ years later, and so by 2012, when I finally got the temporary resident visa, the threats had ramped up from once a week to 10 a day."

His visa came with conditions: Western Australia offers its regional state-sponsored visa to immigrants willing to spend two years working in tiny country towns. Shah and his family went from Karachi, a city of 26 million people, to Northam, in a shire of 7000. "It's not a very popular visa," he says. "Most people try to not get that one."

Northam is a farming community with four bars, two liquor stores, no bookshop or cinema. There probably aren't a lot of opportunities for comedy, then?

"No, no, no, not in Northam. Even less than in Pakistan, probably."

And so Shah became familiar with the two-hour drive to Perth, and by the end of his stay in Northam was doing it twice a day while performing in the capital's clubs. He made his living that way for three years, and grew adept at getting even "a room full of footy fans after a game to cheer a Pakistani guy on stage".

Along the way, a BBC comedy series on the history of Pakistan, a stint on QI and an episode of Australian Story that was devoted to Shah's life helped build his profile, but this year's comedy festival will be the first time Melburnians will be able to catch an act that has earned more frequent flyer miles than most. He has just moved here too, so at least the commute is looking more attractive.

I, MIGRANT & Other Stories by Sami Shah runs from April 5-17 at the Coopers Malthouse.